Magnolia season

Magnolia season is too short. The flamboyant blooms open and are gone before you know it. Since most of the trees are on people’s lawns in my neighbourhood, I had to drive around a bit to find one close enough to the road to paint — I couldn’t very well set up in someone’s front yard with my sketching supplies. Since the blossoms are very light at the top and intensify in colour closer to the stem, the best way to tackle them is to wet each flower with clear water and then go in with pure colour near the stem (I used a combo of Permanent Rose and Permanent Alizarin Crimson). The lighter pink is created as some of that pure pigment mingles with the clear water and travels up the flower. Sketched in a Field Watercolor Journal, 8″ x 8″.

Beautiful, Shari, the way your colors mingle, the lightness of it all!
I have a yellow magnolia in my garden which I also tried to sketch and paint, to much poorer results of course, back at the beginning of April. 🙂 I wish I had seen yours beforehand for proper inspiration! [http://a-cacadora-de-desenhos.blogspot.pt/2016/04/a-minha-magnolia-amarela.html]

Hi Miú. I didn’t know yellow magnolias existed. Yours are beautiful but yellow flowers are so hard to paint. You can’t get the same intensity of colour as I did because the yellow never gets as dark as my pinks did. I had the same problem a few weeks ago when I tried to paint the daffodils. They only work against a darker background.

Yellow magnolias are much rarer and definitely much more recent than the pink and white ones. They are the latest craze of botanicists, it seems. You’re absolutely right about the “yellow” problem. Plus, I made the mistake of not wetting the paper before laying the colour. So, it “stuck” straight away, and didn’t fly up the petals. And, as the original yellow is very, very subtle, the watercolored version came out looking fake. Oh well, I’ll try them again!

Thank you, Shari, for taking the time to check and for your precious feedback. 🙂